Case Study #1 -- Michelle Curtis Subject is a graduate student in psychology who reports a recent traumatic event. While studying one evening while her husband was at work, a thief broke into her apartment and bound her. Despite her denials, the intruder continued to insist that she was hiding large amounts of money and/or valuables. Subject was briefly freed, threatened, then re-tied and silenced with a gag while the thief ransacked her apartment. Most significantly for our study, subject reports that, despite understandable high level of fearful emotion, her mind continued to function rat...

Case Study #1 -- Michelle Curtis Subject is a graduate student in psychology who reports a recent traumatic event. While studying one evening while her husband was at work, a thief broke into her apartment and bound her. Despite her denials, the intruder continued to insist that she was hiding large amounts of money and/or valuables. Subject was briefly freed, threatened, then re-tied and silenced with a gag while the thief ransacked her apartment. Most significantly for our study, subject reports that, despite understandable high level of fearful emotion, her mind continued to function rationally as she analyzed her situation, her captor's motivations and other relevant matters. Once the intruder convinced himself that subject was not actually in possession of large amounts of money, he departed after restraining and silencing the subject again. In a surprising postscript to the event, subject reports that though husband naturally freed her on his return, he found her plight rather intriguing and used the ropes left behind by the intruder to restrain her and also replaced the mouth gag before going off to a bar with a friend. Recommendation: Query subject on stability of marriage in three months.

Case Study #2 -- Holly Lane Subject is an attractive professional woman in her 40s who reports a bizarre encounter while interviewing for a new position. The interview began normally while subject's prospective employer examined her resume. He noted in apparently friendly fashion that both he and subject had attended the same university at the same time some 20 years earlier. Subject responded innocuously, whereupon interviewer questioned her with rising agitation about supposed encounters with subject at the university, alleging that subject had humiliated him by rejecting his requests for dates, encouraging her friends to laugh at him, and otherwise treating him with contempt. As he became increasingly irrational, subject attempted to break off interview and leave, at which time he seized her and used rope bindings to hold her. Subject was rendered helpless and the obviously deranged man inundated her with threats intermingled with crazed suggestions about their "date"; subject was by now unable to cry out for help and was naturally terrified. In contrast to subject #1, she reports limited memory of her ordeal, noting only a vague sense of being freed momentarily, then tied more uncomfortably for an indeterminate period before regaining a sharper sense of her disturbing situation after being tied to a bed. Subject mentions a sensation of near surreal clarity as her criminal approached the bed with obvious intent to himself upon her, only to collapse in a fatal heart attack. Subject struggled out of bindings and notified authorities; physically unharmed but still troubled by nightmares.